The field of this disclosure relates generally to railways and, more particularly, to methods and systems for detecting railway vacancy.
It is often desirable to designate a given railway segment as being either occupied or vacant to enable a determination to be made as to whether a railcar can enter that particular railway segment. To render a vacancy determination as to a particular railway segment, many known vacancy detection systems use sensing devices that, after detecting a railcar, report the presence of the railcar to a single point accumulation device. Known accumulation devices evaluate the sensing events as they occur to enable a continuous, real-time determination as to the vacancy of the entire railway segment to be performed.
Communication between a sensing device and an accumulation device may be susceptible to interruption, such as, for example, from power failures, signal grounding, and/or electromechanical interference at the sensing device. As such, at least some known vacancy detection systems that rely on continuous, real-time communication between each of the sensing devices and the accumulation device may be susceptible to either an inability to render a designation and/or a possibility of rendering an erroneous designation regarding the status of the railway segment because the detection system cannot reconcile sensing events that may have occurred at one or more sensing devices during the communication interruption(s).
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a detection system that can reconcile a count of railcars present on the railway after an interruption in communication between the accumulation device and one or more sensing devices.